


la belle epoque

by vaec (aosc)



Series: If You Wait [2]
Category: Naruto
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-24
Updated: 2014-10-24
Packaged: 2018-02-20 18:23:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2438447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aosc/pseuds/vaec
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sasuke thinks of the encapsulated quiet violence in bracing himself for impact that he knows will be painful, physically or otherwise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	la belle epoque

**Author's Note:**

> the disconnected-yet-connected follow-up to _saltkin_. this may, or may not, be becoming a series.

* * *

 

The moon is a knife sliver, the air distinct with fall and chill. Sasuke slams the door shut, blunting whatever Naruto is saying to a series of noises, any bludgeoning hits confined to their apartment. _Their_. He walks down the stairs, into the curve of the street. He refuses to run, but doesn’t quite manage to keep neither tempo nor breathing down to satisfaction. Blood rushes in his ears, hot and heavy and flooding, _angry_. He’s figured, over time, that routine exercise such as jogging clears him of anger in ways fighting it out doesn’t.

 

Once, when he was thirteen and hot tempered and without boundaries, Kakashi could beat it of out him in training. When he could be blinded by the hot rush of blood in his ears, and miss an obvious opportunity to smoke his teacher’s clone and engage the real Kakashi up close. Kakashi had slouched behind a tree in close proximity to the placement of the clone, but not close enough for Sasuke’s undeveloped Sharingan to be able to clearly gauge where. Sasuke steered for the clone, rather than the man, his anger bubbling, developing. He threw three shuriken, whizzing sharply as they slammed into the wiry trunk of the wrong tree.

 

He had point three seconds to curse his self inflicted ignorance, before Kakashi popped up behind him, far enough to be able to extend his leg to heel him none too gently between his shoulder blades. He forced Sasuke to his knees, pressing him into admitting defeat. Sasuke twisted, uselessly, but enough to be able to glare up at Kakashi’s one dark eye.

 

“Never, ever, let your emotions dictate your actions. Especially not in combat,” his teacher had said, blandly, and released Sasuke with a flick of his ankle, sending him fumbling for balance. Sasuke seethed, but managed to stuff it buried beneath indifference.

 

Once, he’d been thirteen, and felt keenly the ache of his bloodied knuckles. He’d looked at Naruto’s heaving chest and angry brow and seen his pronounced limp, and felt anger drain out of him like poison dribbling from the slit of an open wound.

 

And once in the not so distant past, he thought that it somehow still would. That Naruto could slam him against the kitchen counter and kick him in the unguarded soft spot high up on his inner thigh. See wild upset curling in his shoulders, his eyes – reflecting Sasuke’s carefully crafted indifference, and feel the line of his own shoulders soften. The grating, scraping and utterly ungratifying spike of his anger unfurl. Distance is not so much a physical measurement as it is a mental one.

 

He drives Naruto further from the reach of his own arm’s width. In this world, his reality, which isn’t cursed by the unblinking of a crimson moon stretching the sky thin and looping, Naruto’s emotions eventually become a solitary place not for Sasuke to access at whim anymore. It’s been a year since he allowed Naruto to shoulder him home, and time, he thinks, has not been kind to them, in ways he perhaps naïvely once thought it would be.

 

Sasuke came home to Tsunade’s tight shoulders and hard eyes. He allowed for the Sharingan to bleed forth, and watched how Tsunade waved a hand towards where four ANBU were moving for him. The Mangekyō spun lazily at her, mapping the twitch of her fingers and the flow of chakra quickening in her palms, her pulse visually loud, though retaining a respectable 62 beats per minute. He’d imagined her train of thought – most likely involving murder, and not a pardon ( _silence,_ the Hokage had said, fending Naruto off _, I want_ his _version, not your unwarranted observations_ ).

 

Naruto’s unwarranted observations were all about the absconding and salvation of Sasuke’s soul, and, if anything, he’d understood how Tsunade attempted to shield herself from it. Far be it for her to listen to her aide’s incessant ramblings about the man who’d attempted to have him walk off proverbial, as well as very real, cliffs, one too many times. Sasuke’s very existence continually served as a reminder of where Konoha’s very history had gone off the rails.

 

The worst thing is that there is no indifference left in Sasuke: he loathes giving her the edge of advantage that is making all of her doubts come true.

 

Time passes, and Naruto quietens, not only because he is wizening with age, but because the narrow gap – sturdy, unfathomably unbreakable bond, between him and Sasuke, is on the verge of snapping. Of giving out. It’s crackling beneath the pressure of their initial first domestic fight, which ends in Naruto’s mouth forming a pitch perfect _O_ , lips parted, a quiet shine to his eyes that says understanding has finally dawned on him.

 

There is a painting depicting the Konoha redwood, thick and ominous in slanting twilight, its situate low on a wall in their living room, which lays now askew on the floor in a display of quiet violence. Naruto had stood beside it, blonde and blue and the smear of his fathoming lips darkly colored.

 

“Do you get it now?” asked Sasuke, cruel in the face of – in spite of, someone who would like to believe that he is not yet beyond saving.

 

“I guess I’m an idiot,” said Naruto, “For clinging to the belief that you haven’t given up any core values while – gone. You know, naïve, or whatever.”

 

Sasuke arched an eyebrow. He ignored the push at his ribs, the incessant, meaty thunk of his heart in his chest. ”I guess you should have realized sooner. Maybe you wouldn’t have bothered – trying to bring me home. Since it’s obviously not turning into everything you imagined it’d be.

 

Naruto’s lips quirked into something a little like a smile, a pathetically small thing, barely hanging on, clinging to the quiet flash of teeth and dimples with gradual fade.

 

Sasuke’d turned, and ran. To remove himself from the equation. The situation as it were, threatening to raze his foundations completely. 

 

He continues to probe, to push beneath Naruto’s skin; seeking something of value that he’s lost. He is met with the basis of Naruto, defiant on a molecular level, vibrant in his cells and in his blood, but who seems almost lost in transition.

 

He is at once distant and present, angry, quietly breaking down. And so the persistent itch of anger evolves in Sasuke. He resents it, because once he had the ability to make Naruto flush with challenge, and now they’re just – co-existing. If you could even call it that, when Naruto acknowledges Sasuke by making two portions of spring onions and rice and egg for breakfast, and Sasuke, who takes it, long after Naruto’s slipped out of the door at dawn to attend to work.

 

It’s a stupid fight, this time. It’s continually stupid, really – provoking for its sake.

 

Sasuke is crawling with restlessness; his house arrest pertains to everything outside of Konoha’s tall walls, and there is only so much of simple taijutsu training exercises that he can take before he will eventually slap. It’s not Kakashi, it’s not the faces of chuunin who are sent to Sasuke’s training ground as a special sort of punishment, and it’s not Sakura nor the way Sai’s head drops to the left in quiet contemplation whenever they meet. The old, ugly side of Team 7 versus this new, shiny thing, which smiles daggers at Sasuke.

 

It’s neither of these things, but that somewhere, out there, he could do things. He could be useful – a tool to sharpen, to utilize. Within the confines of the village he is stripped of rank and freedom, and it’s becoming an ugly rash that festers. A remainder of the outdrawn dulling of his edge, and the miscalculated sharpening of his anger as its consequence. It bounces on Naruto, with him for most hours, but bounds back straight for Sasuke, and he thinks that this is not what they are supposed to be, however they’re _supposed_ to be.

 

He laps the market place twice, sees the moon waver and flicker between the tight fit of the buildings, and imagines a world void of anger and sadness and cruelty. At a steep price. He thinks of a world eclipsed in red, and of the Kyuubi curled safely around Naruto’s dipping form, snapping its jaws at Sasuke in disdain. He imagines Naruto’s unmoving, polished look of avoidance and neutrality as he says, _it’s above your station_ , and leaves the room.

 

The tiny silver loops of chakra drains secured around his wrists chafe. They’re a constant reminder of what people feel whenever they look at him now.

 

He swears, a rare burst of emotion, and the raps of his soles against the sidewalk mix with his irregular breathing. He thinks of the intermittent ways in which fate works, rearranges staples of life, the daily pull and tug of emotions that previously worked through Naruto, and now they tumble useless to the floor. Sasuke has no experience with this, barely realizes that this is a two way street of integrity, trust building and exchange.

 

They stood in the slant of light in Naruto’s apartment – also, apparently, Sasuke’s. It was the first occasion of their more or less triumphant return, in which they’d been left to their own devices, in the week and a half since arriving back in Konoha.

 

Naruto’s fingers tangled in the small hairs in the nape of Sasuke’s neck, and shadows wandered the planes of his face, situated in the little crooks of open wonder and marvel.

 

“I see you flicker out before me,” Naruto laughed, a little self conscious. “Like you’re here, but I have to confirm it by touch. It’s been so long.”

 

“Idiot,” Sasuke whispered, and moved away. He’d never know how to choose this for himself.

 

*

 

There are no answers lying in wait on the rooftops, only silence, so Sasuke heads back. Home. He’s not sure which truly applies.

 

Home, a quiet expletive, a torrent of emotions he refuses to explore. The door clicks softly behind him. His shadow casts a splay of dark across the light emitting from the kitchen, and he knows that they’re at a stalemate, and it’s Sasuke who has to break it open. Snap _them_ out of this.

 

“I’m not doing this anymore.”

 

Naruto looks up from the scrolls he’s paging through, finger skimming the black kanji skidding to a halt. “Not doing what?” he asks, mildly, as though their argument from an hour back hadn’t at all occurred.

 

It disgusts Sasuke; anger rushes back through him. “ _This_ ,” he spits, and cups a palm around the image of Naruto, bent over work in informal raw denim and a white t-shirt, sprawling at the far end of their kitchen island. “This _worthless_ existence in chakra cuffs. The Hokage has had her fun; admit that I’ve served my sentence.”

 

Sasuke knows it’s not really Naruto who’s condemned him to this. If anything, he’s probably reduced Sasuke’s sentence by a hefty amount. But he’s here, closest to Sasuke, and easy target practice, and everything they’ve ever done to each other is snap bones, grow bruises.

 

Naruto regards him. “You think I’m the one who’s responsible for your sentence?”

 

No. “Partially.”

 

Naruto’s lips curl mirthless into a slow burning smile. “You know who’s really responsible for all the shit that happens to you?” And Sasuke realizes he’s stepped into that one. One foot unsure in the black fret of an ocean, the other cruelly swept out from underneath him. “It’s you, Sasuke.”

 

“I never wanted this,” he says. A modified truth. He never wanted _this_ version of events.

 

“Many out of us have been saying that since we were thirteen. Guess we’re not able to choose.”

 

Nothing that comes from the two of them is ever going to be easy, Sasuke has realized since long. It’s a fight, a quiet roar, or the loud sparring of personalities, that has always defined their relationship. It’s a war, in its own right, exhilarating in its skewered innocence. Because they were always boys, somewhere deep beneath, and now they aren’t. Sasuke doesn’t know this version of them, and he isn’t ever going to. Not until he explores it, a voice of reason he’s taken to ignoring, says.

 

He remembers the pattern of Naruto’s now calloused fingers on his cheek, quick strokes of them on the base of his spine, over his t-shirt.

 

Naruto is ANBU elite, the protégé of two Sannin, and the son of the Yondaime Hokage. He is brash and never regretting, a handful of promises and a flash of white teeth. In the face of Sasuke moving closer upon his figure, who’s as harmless as a twelve year old once more ( _not true_ , the voice chants, _you can break necks with a twitch of a wrist and blend poison that has no taste_ ), he is visibly tense, and still.

 

Sasuke, the lone of survivor of the Uchiha clan, missing-nin of Konoha, a dozen titles more he has more or less earned through the years, doesn’t stop despite the rush of blood in his ears and instinct telling him to spin on his heel and _run_. 

 

“We’re ruining each other,” Sasuke says, and leans in towards Naruto.

 

He can visualize their separate heartbeats. Sasuke’s, which retains his lower than average of 51 beats per minute, and Naruto’s, which has quickened. In adrenaline - which type of it he’s not certain of. He’s not certain - of whether it’s just Sasuke, but the widening of Naruto’s eyes and the stillness of his posture speaks more words than anything he can ever say. Sasuke doesn’t know a lot about the capacity of human emotions outside the range of hateful anymore, has scrubbed himself clean of them. But he knows the twists and turns of Naruto so intimately, that sometimes he feels he loses himself in the science of him.

 

Naruto tilts his head back to look at Sasuke. “How nice of you to implicate some involvement,” he says. It lacks heat. It’s resigned, a little lilting in wariness, stemming from Sasuke between his thighs and their harsh story. What a pair they make. “Would you leave?”

 

It surprises Sasuke. “I could.” He says it almost like an afterthought, a consideration he hasn’t happened upon until now.

 

“But would you?”

 

No. “From where I stand, I don’t believe it’s my choice to make.”

 

Naruto raises a hand, saying nothing, letting his fingers map a silver swirl of scar on Sasuke’s chin. He barely dares to breath, and when he does, it winds cautiously up his throat. Naruto’s fingers pad and press, exploring, cutting across his cheekbone to run down to his lips. He writes their history in half a minute’s touching, everything ever unsaid, left to wither.

 

“And if it was?” Naruto murmurs, catching the corner of Sasuke’s mouth with an uneven nail.

 

He doesn’t reply. And it’s only after Naruto stands to leave that he releases the wet sigh that’s been building in his mouth.

 

*

 

Sakura performs his bi-monthly medical check-up.

 

“Your chakra pathways are stable, but thinning. I’m going to see if it’s possible for you to go without the blockers for a little bit every day,” she says. She doesn’t say, _or get them removed completely_ , because as much as she once reveled in having him back, she’s aware of what - who, he is, and she sees what him and Naruto are doing to each other. Sakura is anything but stupid, and Sasuke isn’t going to be the one to push her to choose. He might have, once, the color of spite on him, but that was then.

 

“Don’t bother.” Sasuke gently pries her fingers from his wrists and pushes at her hands.

 

Sakura frowns. ”I’m bothering, because you’re not.” She snaps his left hand back up close to her face for inspection. “The branching out in your fingers deviate slightly in the center of your palm. I can’t find a cause, and I have no referencing cases. Have you been experiencing trouble with gathering chakra, aiming it?” She runs a gloved finger across his palm, mapping the lines with the clean surgical eye of someone who regards life objectively on most days, who is forced to, because sometimes she’s taken it away, and now she cradles it in the space between one hand and a scalpel, savoring it.

 

“No, no troubles. It’s – “ because what’s he supposed to say, seeing before him the crescent moon of the Six Paths color the center of his palm black. Sensing Naruto, feeling his pulse thick through Sasuke’s own body, his thoughts reverberating in color and emotion.

 

He swallows a shudder. “Kunai accident,” he finishes at last, his throat parched.

 

Sakura lets his hand go, putting it to cradle half closed in his own lap. “Sasuke,” she says, “What you and Naruto are doing – “

 

“I know,” Sasuke interjects.

 

*

 

Causality is the relation between two events, whereas the second event is a direct physical consequence of the first event. And when Sasuke shuts the door for the twilight evening and disconnected noises of laughter, shouts, and a city shifting from the rurality of daytime to the throes of nighttime, he comes to a halt in front of Naruto who looks at Sasuke as though he is both the cause and the effect. He knows it isn’t necessarily a faulty way of interpretation. And if he knew how to change it, he doesn’t.

 

“I heard that you went to see Sakura,” Naruto says.

 

“Scheduled,” Sasuke replies, “Nothing special.”

 

Naruto looks at him from the insides of shadows, and Sasuke is unable to discern the look he gives him. “Come here,” he beckons after a moment.

 

Sasuke could refuse, knock shoulders on the way past, continue this dizzying twirl of violence and destruction he’s started upon. It is so intimately familiar, it feels as mapping the back of his hand. But on the other side, he takes a step forward, shoulders set, wary, and his middle and ring finger massage the center of his palm. It’s uncharted and wild.

 

He steps up close to Naruto, expecting to be swept along a current that is entirely too fretful and strong not to drown in.

 

Naruto clasps Sasuke’s wrists loosely, rubbing at the shackles. They come off, easy as the flow of water, and Sasuke shudders, sways – with the force, and rush, of having all of his power returning. It’s a torrent, emotion and nerve endings alit, tugging him along in bursts of kaleidoscopic sensations. He doesn’t need eyes, Sharingan or not, to feel the gentle blue of the chakra flow recoloring his system. It floods him, simmers, blinds. Blood rushes in his ears. He has gone a year, forever, without feeling the thrum of power as easily accessible to him as unconscious thinking, and now it’s close to overflowing.

 

“You also went to see Sakura,” Sasuke mutters, ignoring the easy tremble in his tone and the soft _swoosh_ in his ears. He feels vaguely sick, and has to fight the urge to grip Naruto’s thinner wrists and twist for control.

 

Naruto hums. “I did. I go see her even when it has nothing to do with you.” It shouldn’t affect him, but it does, a recoiling hit which he can’t block. The passive aggressive off canter tune, which rattles in Sasuke’s ears. It’s not how he is accustomed to Naruto. This man is not him.

 

“It _did_ have to do with me this time,” Sasuke insists, almost like he’s a desperate man, at last ignoring the tempt of a clipped retort.

 

Naruto’s impossibly blue eyes, the thin of his mouth, says that _too much has to do with you_. “You should rest. Sakura said that you might feel feverish for a few hours.”

 

Sasuke watches him turn away, ironically never more inanimate in the face of action.

 

*

 

Kakashi comes to see him at dawn.

 

The sky is flush with pink, a little matted with grey, and Sasuke arranges his scrolls to lay back in their storage space. It’s a collection of stray pieces, knowledge from the world’s innards, from its corners and its utmost fingertips. Relics from Orochimaru, with frayed edges and ashy patterns from where they were rescued from fire and destruction. There are old and worn clan secrets darkly stained and tattered from the Uchiha compound, thick with documentation of the Sharingan and its users for only Uchiha blood to view. And then there are freshly minted – his own work. Kanji stark and sharp along the rough parchment, lined with black and red and the swirling patterns that trademark Uzushio seals and tweaked Suna genjutsu. He picks with the parchment, corrects little brush strokes, looks for flaws in his designs, until it’s light enough to rise.

 

“I see you’ve been cleared,” comes from Sasuke’s windowsill.

 

His fingers twitch towards the mid of his left thigh in surprise, but no more. It’s certainly large enough a gesture for Sasuke, but it’s been a while since he had to deal with anything but the figurative monsters of his own closet now. He twists in his chair, and levels Kakashi with an arched eyebrow, where his mentor is perched in the yawn of the window.

 

“Maybe the Hokage got tired of loathing me for both my personality and my uselessness,” Sasuke shrugs.

 

Kakashi studies him. Then he smiles. “Well, if you’d like the answer to that, you’ve received a summon. Hokage-sama requests your presence at nine hundred hours, her office.”

 

He slips a hand into the pouch fastened to his right hip, just behind the sheath of the tantō Sasuke never sees his teacher without, searches for an instance, and then withdraws and throws a wrap of a scroll at Sasuke, along with a small paper wrapping. He doesn’t think before his fingers snap up to catch them. Kakashi meets his gaze with the annoying curve to his expression that says he just knows.

 

The tiny message scroll sits, nonetheless, heavy on his palm. The package, a little crumpled and caving on its ends, just as much. Heavier, even. He knows before he picks away at the paper, what it will be.

 

Kakashi has gone by the time Sasuke turns the Konoha hitai-ate up and discovers that it’s a new commission. He ignores the tick of his heart speeding up.

 

* 

 

Tsunade’s scrutiny is something he has come before only a select number of times in his life. It’s never matched up to his imagination. The Godaime Hokage is situated lazily behind her desk, tapping rhythmically upon it, studying Sasuke silently. This time around, he allows for the Sharingan to rest, and watches her back neutrally. The only audience they have is Shizune and two ANBU.

 

“I expect your loyalty now, and nothing short of it,” Tsunade says after some time. Her eyes flicker between his face and the hitai-ate now tied snugly against the line of his collar, not against his forehead. He almost laughs. As though this simplistic piece of metal and cotton connects immediately to the nerves in his knees, will make him bend before her and give her the remainder of his serviceable years. Sasuke raises his chin, regards her, one breath, four seconds, his heart.

 

_Will you leave?_

 

_No._

 

“You’ve waited for quite some time to ask for it,” he replies, defiance in every rolling syllable.

 

Sasuke has never asked anything of this woman – of the village she rules. He has never allowed himself to be sworn to anyone; to the Sandaime, or Orochimaru, nor her. Team 7, Team Taka. Sasuke is his own, _the avenger_. He has obligations towards no one, and the only one to ever persuade him to do anything is not a part of this immediate conversation.

 

Tsunade makes a low sound in her throat, the easy line of her brow hardening. “I won’t tolerate your mouthing off, brat,” she warns. “I have no need for you. My lenience towards you is because of Naruto, _do not_  mistake me for your ally.”

 

He’s surprised, if anything, of the blatant way in which she comes out and says it. He grits his teeth, because it’s always Naruto. It’s Naruto, ubiquitous, for everyone – and when Sasuke attempts to give in, give himself up, he flickers out of reach. It all comes down to that tiny detail, the unraveling of a knot, the bending of metal.

 

“How much?” says Sasuke.

 

“How much what?” says Tsunade.

 

“How many years were reduced off of my sentence because of _him_?” He spits it, the pronoun an explosion. He sees, in the corner of the room, how Fox corrects his stance. So easy, Sasuke wants to punch him.

 

Tsunade stills, becomes a figure of power, unreachable. “Execution,” she says, simply, fitting so well in her mouth that it’s no wonder, after all, that she and nobody else is the Hokage. “There’s an A-rank waiting for you at the mission’s desk. Three scrolls. Intelligence gathering. Hatake will provide your gear and supplies. Dismissed.”

 

Sasuke walks on coals out of her office.

 

*

 

He never expected to don a jounin vest. The padded material fits him snugly, the zip sliding up to settle at the base of his throat smoothly. Yet there is something distinctly off kilter with the outfit. The vest smooths over his fishtail undershirt awkward and new, the hitai-ate is too tight, the scrolls he picks from Iruka without an exchange of words is heavy with his old teacher’s quiet, razed expectations.

 

He never expected this to work.

 

He shuts the door to the apartment from the midday sun and the fifteen hours he has until he’s to head out, finding silence and an imbalance to his thought, the wrong note to his footsteps as they echo. He knows where just below the soft hairs of the neck to push a senbon to paralyze the spine, in three seconds his Mangekyō will have induced an imaginary twenty four hour cycle of death in a fully grown adult of broad statue, and the best sensory type-nin in either of the five great countries has tutored him in chakra visualization. He is comfortable in the art of killing, the deftness of a kunai pressing into his palm, the reassurance of death. It is sure, and for Sasuke it has always been a viable choice – a constant presence. His life is death, ironically, or perhaps just perfectly balanced.

 

Before him he sees Fox scrape his feet in the carpet, a little twitch of his fingers; Naruto could just as well have shouted, Sasuke hears it ring so crystalline.

 

_Blatant_ , he thinks. “Obvious,” he says, to the shadows. They do not reply.

 

Sasuke knows that when ANBU move out on missions, they are required to follow protocol. They are surgically precise, these rules. They tell no one they are going, despite the obvious glare of their omission from the bustle of every day life. So when Sasuke goes to make dinner, much later, tuna, spring onion and rice, and Naruto’s bright dual chakra is nowhere to be found, he knows. It skitters beneath his skin, this knowledge.

 

He never expected this to work, and he knows now, the chord barely holding them, sees it strung tightly before him. He could snap it.

 

*

 

Life is about choices.

 

Sasuke bends out of the way, twists along the ground and throws three shuriken whizzing from the spaces between his fingers. The Mangekyō circles, already creating a map of his enemy’s combat patterns and chakra pathways bled in red, and Sasuke flips up on a wrist to regain a somewhat foothold. He makes quick seals on the rounds of his heels, and pushes his palms to the earth, sending a tremor which splits the floor of the forest into a yawning gash.

 

The greatest strategy in combat is to be anonymous. Do not announce yourself. His enemy knows this just as well as Sasuke does, and it’s close, a kunai edges his face out of the crown of a tree. He evades, a smear of blood along his cheek, and breathes fire towards a criss cross of pale green chakra burning painfully bright in his left peripheral.

 

If at some point, Sasuke had been taught to cradle life in his palms, intent on its fire being kept alive rather than snuffed out, he can’t recall it. Perhaps a child, but the vignettes of memories that old are washed out and bleak now, silhouetted and shaded but not distinguished. Sasuke walks through life a constant unwritten page. Maybe he should stop doing so.

 

He levels a tree and hears the crunch and snap of bones and the echoing scream of the Iwa-nin who’s now been trapped, at least partially, beneath the trunk. In the hide of his sleeve there’s a thin needle with a colorless, odorless chakra drain infused in its container. He finds the vein easily enough, slipping the needle through skin and into the rush of blood.

 

Then he has a choice.

 

There is nothing he can do about the reshaping of bone structure. He sets what he manages, working with quiet efficiency, alone, and strips his shirt into pieces to tie securely. Then he does what he can with chakra strings connecting deep into the tissue, not a healer, but an attempt away at salvaging what may be salvaged. He puts the scalpel away, and wonders if this is the choice he has to make now.

 

Tsunade says, _execution_ , and Fox twitches, and Sasuke realizes that really, he’s always known.

 

*

 

He thinks of the encapsulated quiet violence in bracing himself for impact that he knows will be painful, physically or otherwise.

 

As a shinobi, he is accustomed to rising at odd hours, and so when his senses ultimately strike wake into the base of his spine, well, then he knows that he is not alone with immediate alert. His is a state that is never borderline, but merely awake, or asleep. He is not alone, and the other presence, quiet and yet not, shuts the door. Naruto is home.  _Home_. Sasuke tastes it now, shaped so differently than a few days ago. A predicate.

 

Their bedrooms lay opposite each other, so Sasuke, through the vulnerable display of a door widely open, sees Naruto when he stops in the door frame and turns towards Sasuke. His breath lodges in his throat – he is never prepared for this. Their omnipresent bond is there, taut, and he could snap it right now.

 

“You left,” says Sasuke.

 

The Sharingan has no need for light, so he sees well through the dark how Naruto’s shoulders square in surprise. The greatest strategy in battle is, besides anonymity, to take your opponent by surprise.

 

“You didn’t,” Naruto replies after filling the silence thick with thoughts forever unspoken.

 

Sasuke twists his legs over the edge of his bed. “Time hasn’t stopped,” he points out.

 

“No,” Naruto agrees, “but I left so you couldn’t do it first.” He lets _again_ become the untold point, burning, but not aflame.

 

Somewhere, viscerally, Sasuke _feels_. It’s large and incomprehensible and just confirms this paradigm that Naruto is to Sasuke. It makes a laugh bubble up in his throat, incongruous and sharp. “Your logic is so irrefutably stupid sometimes, it’s hard to believe you’ve not been declared mentally compromised yet.”

 

Up close, Naruto is just two interchangeable chakra systems fleshing out into a tall body to Sasuke’s eyes, and his scent is heady and a little bit damp with rain and the redwood forest. Sasuke allows himself to blink the Sharingan away, to give way to the encompassing darkness of night, and pulled down drapes.

 

“Do you want me to swear to you?” he asks, now soft, a whisper.

 

Naruto’s fingers search him, a rustle of clothes and warmth edging closer. “No,” he replies, and finds Sasuke’s jaw. “No,” he repeats. “I don’t want you to swear to anything. You wouldn’t, anyway. I just want you to stop being so fucking dense.”

 

Sasuke thinks, _I did figure you out_ , and he catches Naruto’s fingers in the lace of his own. 

 

For what they are, the kiss is surprising, a gentle slide of teeth and coiled desire.

 

Sasuke fists his fingers in Naruto’s jacket, pulling him downwards. They balance in free air, Naruto runs his index finger along the sharp corner of Sasuke’s jaw with fever, and it’s the only remotely desperate movement he allows until they break apart for panted breaths.

 

Sasuke shudders, and braces for impact. The chord, intact, faintly shimmering.

 

*


End file.
